Seeing that Toutiao is about to reach the growth ceiling, Zhang Yiming, under the pressure of expansion, spent $1 billion to acquire Musical.ly in 2017, and in exchange for two generals who helped ByteDance build two new growth curves, one bright and one dark.
Zhu Jun, who is also the co-founder of Musical.ly, led TikTok to globalization; Another Lianchuang Yang Lu Yu was transferred to the hardware business by Zhang Yiming, and told the other party that Byte's future business will "change from soft to hard, from online to offline".
Hardware has become a necessary attempt for Bytes to find new scenarios and expand new users. In the past seven years, Byte has tested the waters of mobile phones, educational hardware, and VR, but has encountered setbacks one after another.
But with the advent of new generative AI technologies, bytes, which have repeatedly lost battles, have germinated new ideas for making hardware. Recently, some media broke the news that Byte had secretly launched an AI mobile phone research and development project in April. Byte refuted the rumor that it is not making AI mobile phones, but exploring large-scale model software solutions based on mobile phones for mobile phone manufacturers to use for reference, and emphasized that "there is no plan to make and sell mobile phones by ourselves." ”
Although it is unable to generate revenue through direct sales of mobile phones, Byte still does not give up the opportunity to find incremental growth from AI hardware.
After ChatGPT detonated a new round of AI application boom, Hu Jie, founder and CEO of Xiaoli Zhizao, which is positioned as a desktop robot, once told the alphabet list (ID: wujicaijing) that in order to access external large-scale model service providers in products, it is necessary to pay hundreds of thousands of yuan to the other party every year.
Compared with Hu Jie, mobile phone manufacturers are undoubtedly a customer with stronger payment ability. IDC disclosed in the "AI Mobile Phone White Paper" released to the public that it is expected that in 2024, the shipment of AI mobile phones in the Chinese market will reach 37 million units, and by 2027, this number will grow to 150 million units, and the market share of AI mobile phones will exceed 50%.
This also means that bytes, which want to sell large-scale software solutions to mobile phone manufacturers, will usher in a potential market of at least tens of billions.
Liu Ke, who was transferred from PICO to the mobile phone project team in February this year, just ended his cooperation with a domestic mobile phone manufacturer some time ago, and Liu Ke is responsible for implementing the bean bag large model capability into the partner's mobile phone intelligent assistant to jointly create some AI agent applications.
As more and more 3C manufacturers and Internet companies focus on hardware, the industry has gradually begun to regard 2024 as the "first year of AI hardware".
In addition to being rumored to be developing AI phones, in May this year, Bloomberg reported that Byte acquired Chinese headphone manufacturer Oladance for $50 million. This move was interpreted by the outside world as a sign that Byte's management saw the potential of wearable devices as an AIGC service platform.
The multi-way attack on AI hardware is reminiscent of the "miracle of vigor" methodology pursued by Byte. At an event in 2016, Zhang Yiming once mentioned to the outside world, "I first heard this sentence when I was learning to play billiards, that is, to use brute force to hit the ball in." ”
However, with Zhang Yiming's retirement at the end of 2021, Byte under Liang Rubo began to change its rhythm, and its borderless expansion was replaced by a focus on its main business, and the methodology of "vigorously producing miracles" began to give way to reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
After feeling the change in the company's management strategy, Wang Kai did not choose to stick to and wait for the arrival of new opportunities like Liu Ke in the PICO layoffs in November last year, but jumped to a new car company, "(electric vehicles) This is the current indisputable hardware outlet. ”
Wang Kai's worries are not unreasonable. AI hardware is the future, but it is difficult to become a new opportunity today. "So the first year, you can refer to the SaaS industry, some people have been calling the first year of SaaS since 2012, and it has been shouting until 2022." Jiang Yi, founding partner of Hengye Capital, described it this way.
A
With the help of generative AI, AI hardware has rapidly risen as one of the current trends, and has attracted many forces such as Internet manufacturers and 3C manufacturers to compete on the same stage.
Especially in terms of the availability of computing power and the convenience of AI experience, AI hardware that can directly run large model capabilities on the device side has incomparable allure.
What's more, compared with traditional hardware, the emergence of AI hardware is expected to bring a subversive experience at the interactive level, "Now I want to run a process within the company, I may need seven clicks." If I switch to AI hardware, I can do it in one step through voice interaction, which is equivalent to saving the time in the middle six steps. In Jiang Yi's view, the interface changes generated by AI hardware will eventually bring efficiency improvements on the user side.
However, it should be noted that a major factor in determining whether AI hardware can be recognized by consumers is inseparable from the exploration and development of high-frequency rigid demand scenarios.
Based on this, major Internet manufacturers, including Bytes, make AI hardware, in fact, "hardware is not their purpose, but the scene is, especially the scene function that users use frequently, or the high-frequency use scenario function that has not been discovered." Jiang Yi analyzed.
However, it is not easy to find high-frequency scenarios that meet the needs of the public. Some AI hardware innovation pioneers have begun to encounter crises: AI Pin, which played the banner of "artificial intelligence iPhone" and brought the platform of OpenAI founder Ultraman, was launched only half a year ago, and Humane, the R&D company behind it, was exposed to the news of betrayal in May. Another star AI hardware, the Rabbit R1, has also been questioned about the shell of Android.
Due to the lack of rigid adaptation scenarios with offline hardware products, resulting in unfavorable progress, Byte has already experienced it once when it entered the Internet of Vehicles.
In May 2020, Byte confirmed to the media that it had set up an Internet of Vehicles team and planned to launch its own vehicle infotainment system solution to realize the landing of its mobile Internet products such as Douyin and Toutiao in automotive terminals. But just by simply implanting Douyin into the car machine, the value is not great, and Kuaishou is a lesson from the past. In July 2019, Kuaishou cooperated with Zebra to access the Kuaishou short video function in the Banma.ai 3.0 system, and installed it into the smart travel entertainment system of SAIC Roewe RX5 MAX, but the user response was mediocre, mainly because it was limited by the scene.
Wu Kewei, a person in the Internet of Vehicles industry chain, told the alphabet list that what is more valuable is to provide car owners with some information that can assist driving safety, "If you get around, just do some entertainment on it, go to a Douyin, this thing is not reliable." "What this reflects behind is precisely the problem of scene porting for non-rigid applications.
B
Before the arrival of AI hardware, Byte had found two scenarios that seemed to be just needed, and adapted the hardware for them: one is education, and the other is games.
At the end of 2018, on the basis of the Hammer Technology Nut mobile phone team acquired at the end of 2018 at a cost of hundreds of millions of yuan, Byte established the "New Stone Laboratory" and built it into the company's "hardware middle platform". In the two years that the team has been running-in, Newstone Lab has released two generations of nut mobile phones, new TNT display products, speakers and other peripheral products, trying to develop office scenes.
Due to the mediocre response to the office scene, the focus of "Xinshi Laboratory" has been adjusted to the educational hardware track. In 2020, Byte officially launched Dali Education, and simultaneously released the first educational hardware - smart desk lamp. According to LatePost, in addition to desk lamps, Byte is also developing a variety of educational hardware, including educational tablets, pocket learning printers, children's early education machines, dictionary pens and so on.
As Byte's first educational hardware product, Zhang Yiming attaches great importance to it, not only internally evaluating the "vigorous intelligent work lamp" as a "breakthrough with bright spots" in the education business, but also in the ninth anniversary speech of ByteDance in 2021, he once again mentioned the smart desk lamp, listing it as one of the businesses that the company has made progress in the past year.
With the strengthening of Zhang Yiming's attention, by January 2021, Xinshi Lab was officially merged into the Byte Education Hardware team led by Yang Luyu, the co-founder of Musical.ly, who also became the first person in charge of Byte Education Hardware hand-picked by Zhang Yiming, and reported to Chen Lin, the CEO of Dali Education at the time.
However, with the introduction of the "double reduction" policy, the content strategy of vigorous education has been suspended, and the integrated development plan of software and hardware in Chen Lin's plan is unsustainable.
In July 2022, Yang Luyu officially resigned from Byte. Byte's educational hardware dream also stayed in the stage of smart desk lamps for a short time, and a series of subsequent product plans lost the opportunity to appear on stage.
But Zhang Yiming's hardware heart is not dead. In August 2021, Byte spent billions of yuan to acquire PICO, the No. 1 manufacturer in domestic VR shipments, in an attempt to replicate the VR+ game path taken by Facebook (later renamed Meta).
In 2020, before the acquisition, some leading VR games began to make profits, and Zhou Hongwei, the founder of PICO, mentioned, "In fact, the number of users is only 1 million to 2 million, but the profit is very considerable." ”
Five months before the acquisition of PICO, Byte had just completed the acquisition of game developer Mutong Technology at a cost of tens of billions of yuan. Since 2019, the game business has been being explored, and the self-research team of Byte has also been experimenting with VR-related businesses internally.
But Zhang Yiming's VR hardware dream fell back again. In November last year, the byte game business laid off employees, and even broke the news of packaging and selling Mutong Technology.
The content of the game was blocked, and PICO was not immune to the dilemma. In November of the same year, PICO also ushered in a major layoff, affecting nearly half of its employees.
However, judging from the acquisition of the headphone manufacturer Oladance and the news of the research and development of AI mobile phones, Byte still retains a heart that has been defeated again and again in terms of hardware.
C
In addition to hardware, there is another area where Byte also retains the momentum of repeated defeats, and that is social.
Douyin's social layout can be traced back to 2018, and at the end of that year, Douyin launched the "Douyin Friends" and "Douyin Letters" functions. The following year, Douyin released the short video social app "Duoshan", which was seen as an important charge for WeChat's social status.
When the development of "multi-flash" was not as expected, entering the AIGC era, Byte found a new idea of redoing social networking as if it had discovered a new continent of AI hardware, launched the AI social APP "Talking Furnace", and even quietly restarted the "multi-flash" APP that was forgotten by the outside world.
Wang Tianfan, managing director of Bertelsmann Asia Investment Fund, pointed out in an interview with the interface that Byte needs an infrastructure like social to enhance its competitiveness, "Toutiao has always had the heart to do social, and social is a lower infrastructure than all Toutiao's current products, and if there is no social networking, it will always be subject to Tencent." ”
Through social products, Bytes can not only open up the traffic pool between various products, but also further cultivate user loyalty. In terms of enhancing user stickiness, hardware has the same effect, and as a hardware in offline scenarios, it can also reduce customer acquisition costs, increase traffic exposure, and increase revenue.
Even Zuckerberg, who holds the world's largest social product matrix, can't escape his obsession with hardware. After buying Oculus for $3 billion in 2014, Zuckerberg made a point that many companies would become vassals of Google and Apple if they missed the design of smartphones and their operating systems. In the future, only with our own hardware platform and system can we control our destiny.
However, AI hardware is the future, but it is difficult to become an opportunity that Byte can seize at the moment, "because this is a track where consumer expectations are seriously overdrawn." Jiang Yi thinks.
Including Apple, Huawei and other leading hardware manufacturers, the end-side AI functions advertised to the outside world are all futures. Only a very small number of the AI features released by Apple at the 2024WWDC will be launched in the fall of 2024, and according to technology reporter Gurman, some major features such as Siri understanding device content, semantic indexing, artificial intelligence control devices, and screen perception functions will be delayed until 2025.
Huawei's Harmony Intelligence (HarmonyOS native intelligence) in June, some AI functions have also been postponed to 2025.
In the era of smart speakers,Consumers' expectations for AI have been severely overdrawn once,Now,Will AI hardware repeat the experience of smart speakers?
Resources:
"ByteDance develops AI mobile phones? The response is coming" CBN
"AI Mobile Phone White Paper" IDC
"Pico Layoffs, Byte VR Vigorously Didn't Have a Miracle" intelligence emerged
"TikTok Insider: Zhang Yiming's Great Wave Journey" Zhang Xiaojun
How does ByteDance make educational hardware? >> LatePost